7 ms·
One of paper authors here. I'll try and answer some of the questions in the comments. It seems like so long ago the paper actually went public onto the arXiv,
by jrichardshaw 6y ago
One of paper authors here. I'll try and answer some of the questions in the comments.
It seems like so long ago the paper actually went public onto the arXiv, but I guess the press embargo just ended.
- magicMonkeyPaw 6y agoare you looking forward to reading all the crazy people's takes on why it's actually aliens that you found?
- jrichardshaw 6y agoAlways! I think astronomers often make it worse. I mean, we like thinking about why things are actually aliens as much as anyone else (LGM1 was already mentioned), and while we mostly try to restrain ourselves, every now and again a famous astronomer breaks and lets out a paper about it.
- plutonorm 6y agoThat's great to hear! If some credible evidence of aliens did appear, where do you think it would come from? Tabby's Star like data? atmospheric spectra? FRB's? other? Would absolutely love to hear your thoughts :)
- antepodius 6y agoMy guess is a nanotech slug impacting earth and turning us into grey goo/a matrioshka brain factory.
- tlow 6y agoCan you say more about these nanotech slugs please?
- 0ld 6y agoI believe they are referencing James S. A. Corey The Expanse [0] series [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)
- antepodius 6y agoHaha, nah, it was more the general idea. An amalgam of sci-fi. Greg Egan had a story where an advanced civ sends a gram-sized slug into the gas giant of a solar system, which bootstraps to machinery that 3d prints people and machinery, which is a plausible enough inspiration that I can give it here. Just remove the implausible 'nobody just decides to go bacteria-mode' aspect from Egan's far-future stories.
- Intermernet 6y agoDo you happen to remember which story? I like Greg Egan and that one sounds interesting.
- antepodius 6y agoFound it eventually: https://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/files/GregEganGlory.pdf https://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/files/GregEganGlory.pd... All his stories are listed here, whether they be published on his website or elsewhere: https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online.html https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online.html
- Intermernet 6y agoThanks!
- brainbag 6y agoIt's not the Egan book but Accelerando by Charles Stross is my favorite near-current day up to post-singularity book and it covers topics like this in a fantastic and fun way.
- api 6y agoThat already happened. Living cells are nanotechnology. Something loaded with them impacted billions of years ago, and we're currently working on AI and rockets.
- gota 6y agoThis seems a reasonable and straightforward scenario and I'll prepare accordingly
- antepodius 6y agoMake yourself intra-universally interesting enough that the alien construction management AI might instantiate a simulation of you from the cached info at some point. It's a strange sort of Darwinism, but it's all we've got.
- thelittleone 6y agoPerhaps we are an instance created by an alien construction management AI that is wondering if we will become self aware before the timeout.
- gubby 6y agoAn instantiation of me from a backup, however accurate, would be no use to my sense of having survived as I would have ceased to exist and not even be aware of the copy.
- antepodius 6y agoThat's fine! People with your philosophy of self will just cease to exist, as they presumably will refuse to optimize for likelihood of being simulated, and those with a more permissive notion of self-identity will be the ones willing to adapt to the hellish computational circumstances. (Of course, you could say that everyone's ceasing to exist, here, because your rules of what counts as a person and what's their copy applies to everyone. But please realize that, from the point of view of those who think having a copy survive is better than all of them dying, and is partial survival in some sense, that being simulated is a form of winning, even if you think both the person and the copy are deluding themselves.) (Though I do wonder how you go about the day without having a nervous breakdown, given that your evolving state is probably quantized, or at least sliceable, meaning there's no great physical difference between your pattern shifting from one [smallfractionofa]second to the next, destroying the old one and replacing it with a new one, and your old pattern being destroyed and replaced somewhere else. It's not like your past self is aware of your future copy in normal life, either!) (I'm not saying you're wrong; just that the situation is a lot worse than you think it is, and that we should all be living (and repeatedly dying) in absolute existential terror.)
- perl4ever 6y agoI think there was a HN thread not that long ago about speculation that (at least some) viruses come to earth from space, so perhaps it is happening all the time.
- pvaldes 6y agoEarth is perfectly capable to do it at home. Has created things more bizarre than viruses.
- kabacha 6y agoThis seems such a "flat earth" type of hypothesis. I mean viruses depend on their hosts 100% so them coming from somewhere with no hosts and successfully slotting in with new hosts just seems immeasurably unlikely.
- perl4ever 6y agoWell, you assume there are no hosts. I'm sure others have written more, and more intelligent things, but my general thinking about panspermia is: - it seems like a universal rule there are more small things than large things - there are more small red stars than stars like our sun - there should probably be more brown dwarfs than small stars - there are more small planets than large ones - planets can and do form without stars - planets should outnumber stars, and planets without stars should outnumber planets with stars - there are probably more oceans below the surface of objects in our solar system than on the surface - the universe existed for a long time before the solar system ...so it kind of seems intuitive to me that life should have developed underground where there's warmth from radioactivity and water, on countless free floating planets over billions of years and occasionally one of those gets blown to bits and something like that seeded our unusual planet. ...and it doesn't seem entirely implausible to me that there should be so much biological material in space that we get a certain amount all the time like micrometeoroids.
- antepodius 6y agoI was recently browsing my uni's master's projects, having to pick one. One of the projects was titled "did COVID-19 come from space?" I sort of regret not picking it; it's too funny. I'll definitely be reading it when whoever got it's done.
- reedwolf 6y agoI haven't seen the original paper (maybe that should've been linked instead?), but the MIT press release is dripping with "Not it's saying aliens..." innuendo. It's kind of hypocritical to use nod-wink-aliens-clickbait to drum up media attention, then ridicule the first rube who asks if aliens could possibly be involved.
- jrichardshaw 6y agoThat's a fair comment. I mostly think the MIT press release is pretty good and doesn't go down that route, except for the title, which is definitely hinting at it. Also agree that it would make sense to replace the link with the actual paper, or an article about it. University press releases are mostly there to play up their own contribution.
- redis_mlc 6y ago> It's kind of hypocritical ... ridicule the first rube That's why I always ridicule the mars colonization and alien contact scifi fanbois on HN, who actually believe in that nonsense. Here's a question for them. The History channel used to have documentaries, but now it has alien fiction videos. Is that your fault?
- networkimprov 6y agoWhen are you scheduled for an appearance on the Event Horizon podcast? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3qvETKooktNgCvvheuQDw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3qvETKooktNgCvvheuQDw
- jrichardshaw 6y agoActually looks like Shriharsh, one of the folks in the collaboration has already done it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc8FsImLUEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc8FsImLUEU I guess he probably didn't talk about this because of the press embargo though.
- koheripbal 6y agoAm I the only one that needs an RSS feed to follow a podcast channel? Maybe I'm using the wrong app?
- tomcooks 6y agoTry antennapod, it's libre software
- koheripbal 6y agoI don't see how to subscribe to a Youtube video with antennapod. Have you done it?
- tomcooks 6y agoI assumed you were talking about podcasts, audio only. Try finding the RSS feed of the channel and adding it to Antennapod, but I am not sure it will work
- koheripbal 6y agoI found the RSS feed - https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCz3qvETKooktNgCvvheuQDw https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCz3qvET... ...unfortunately, it's not a podcast RSS format, so there's no way to load it into Podkicker. In AntennaPod, it'll subscribe, but won't download or play the episodes...
- pso 6y agoPure speculation, isn't the most interesting time period in the signal the transition from signal to no-signal (and back again)? How high is the resolution of the sensors? Is it possible that some frequencies are blocked fractionally earlier than others? At a fine enough temporal resolution, there might be more clues regarding the source.
- jrichardshaw 6y agoGood question. For many FRBs there is access to the original antenna time streams (which are essentially voltages samples at 800 MHz), so superficially that might give you 1.25ns resolution. However, the intrinsic width of the pulses seem to be more like ~1ms. That tells you something about the emission source, giving you a rough upper bound on it's size of c * 1ms ~ 300km. However, lots of interesting plasma physics effect occur between us and the FRB. The dominant thing that happens is that low frequencies arrive later than high frequencies (as they travel slow in a plasma). This causes the FRB to be smeared over many seconds rather than a millisecond. There's also multi path interference effects and an whole bunch of other stuff that happens. So actual the temporal structure of the burst tells you much more about the intervening medium than it does about the source.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoI think of multipath being about signals bouncing off other objects (reflection) and bending through media (refraction) before reaching the receiver. At the cosmic scale, I'm guessing multipath also involves gravitational lensing. Correct?
- jrichardshaw 6y agoThere is some possibility of gravitational lensing of FRBs and people are definitely searching for it. However, in this case it is refraction caused by variation in the density of the ionised gas between us and the source (within our galaxy, the host galaxy, and at lower densities in the intervening medium).
- cheerlessbog 6y ago
- sradman 6y agoHave any additional FRBs been detected since the publication of the paper?
- jrichardshaw 6y agoMany. I'm not super involved on the FRB side of CHIME, so I'm not 100% clear what is public and what isn't. But you can an idea from public info around the internet. I think the last total number made public was over 700 in March this year, and the previous one 30 in October 2018 (https://aasnova.org/2020/03/13/chime-detects-even-more-repeating-bursts/ https://aasnova.org/2020/03/13/chime-detects-even-more-repea...).
- mturmon 6y agoCould you say something about how you are now, or might later, coordinate fast follow up observations in other wavelengths or with other instruments?
- jrichardshaw 6y agoThis is a good question. FRBs pose a lot of challenges for follow up because most of them are not observed to repeat (this doesn't mean they don't repeat, just that they haven't been seen to). So you see them for a few seconds and then they're gone. To follow up, you need to know where exactly to look, and most of the instruments like CHIME used to discover FRBs don't have the resolution to see exactly where on the sky it was. You can maybe pin point it to within 1/4 degree, but need more like 1000th degree resolution to meaningfully follow up in other wavebands. The most useful follow up has been for repeating FRBs. What happens there is that the discovery telescope tells you were it is roughly, and you know it repeats, so you can point a high resolution radio telescope (something like https://www.evlbi.org https://www.evlbi.org) to get a more precise location and then you can follow up with other telescopes. One thing telescopes like CHIME are trying to do in the near future is to build their own long baseline station to give much higher resolution, such that they can get localisation on bursts which don't repeat, and do better follow up.
- mturmon 6y agoThank you. I had been slightly familiar with fast follow up for SNs (that were detected optically), but their follow up times are much more forgiving than FRBs. The localization issue is also interesting.
- irthomasthomas 6y agoAssuming that it is aliens, for a moment, we can not know if these aliens are friendly or hostile, right? So, given that there is a 50/50 chance of them being hostile, and given their awesome show of strength, the precautionary principal dictates that we not advertise our presence too loudly.
- pvaldes 6y ago33 % chance of being hostile, 33% of being friendly and 33% of do not wanting anything with us in decades by cause of an humongous jet-lag
- goatlover 6y agoThey wouldn't know about us for 500 million years, assuming we could emit a strong enough signal for them to detect that far away. Any aliens that could actually pose a threat would probably be close enough to pick up our emissions anyway.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SubiculumCode 6y agoIs it fair to say that leading hypotheses for this kinds of events include an orbiting body, leading to the periodicity?
- jrichardshaw 6y agoYeah, that's definitely one of the main hypotheses. There aren't any other repeating FRBs known to do this yet, so how general a mechanism this is, is not known.
- ellis0n 6y agoThe more powerful technology provides the more powerful chips and telescopes and microscopes. On the basis of new data obtained with the help of new devices, new theories are created that help in creating even more microscopic components, which will help in creating even more powerful devices recursively. The singularity in the action of CHIME and AI made it possible to determine the signal; a major breakthrough is coming in all areas. Interestingly, somewhere there is a miscalculation when we can look into the space using a smartphone in real time? Any related theorems?
- johnwangdoe 6y agoWHat do you think about Contant the movie in relations to your job?
- jrichardshaw 6y agoI mean, I sit around wearing headphones a lot, but that's about the closest it gets I'm afraid :)
- zitterbewegung 6y agoWhats the most annoying question you get when you bring up this research paper?
- AYBABTME 6y agoWhy are there press embargoes for these things?
- 317070 6y agoIn order to maximize impact. Press doesn't want to talk about this unless there is an embargo, otherwise they might be 'late' in which case they would rather not mention it at all (and not have to spend costly journalist time)